(LifeSiteNews) – Advocate Health Care in Illinois is the latest hospital system to stop giving gender-transition drugs to minors in response to pressure from the Trump administration.
Advocate, which operates 11 hospitals and 200 other facilities across Illinois, announced it will “no longer provide or prescribe gender-affirming care medications for patients under age 19,” the Chicago Tribune reported.
“We recognize that this is a deeply complex issue, and this decision was made after a multi-disciplinary team spent numerous hours carefully considering the options and outcomes,” it added. “This new policy allows our hospitals, clinics and pharmacies to continue caring for all patients’ health needs in the changing federal environment.”
The news follows similar announcements by the University of Michigan, Yale Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, UChicago Medicine, and Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C.
All were spurred by one of President Donald Trump’s earliest executive actions upon returning to office: an order that ends all federal financial support for “transition” procedures on minors, rescinds or amends all of the Biden health bureaucracy’s past endorsements of underage “transitioning,” and calls for a review of the medical literature on the subject, enforcing all existing restrictions on underage “transitioning,” and taking regulatory action to “end” the practice to the greatest extent possible under current law.
Illinois is one of 15 states challenging the Trump administration in court over the effort, but they have yet to secure an injunction.
A large body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored detransitioners, individuals who attempted transitioning before regretting it and returning to life as their true sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”
In the meantime, the Tribune noted that far-left Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker launched a free hotline to “support LGBTQIA+ people, through which they can learn about their legal rights and be connected to health and social services.”
